THE GLORY OF THE COMING
What Mine Eyes Have Seen Of Americans In Action In This Year Of Grace
And Allied Endeavor
By Irvin S. Cobb
George H. Doran Company
1918
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is
trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath
loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword, His Truth is
marching on.”
--Battle Hymn of the Republic
This book is made up of articles written abroad in the spring and
summer of 1918 and cabled or mailed back for publication at home. For
convenience in arrangement, a few of these papers have been broken
up into sectional subdivisions with new chapter headings inserted;
otherwise the matter is here presented practically in its original form.
It has been given to the writer to behold widely dissimilar aspects of
the Great War. As a neutral observer, hailing from a neutral country,
I was a witness, in Belgium, in northern France, in Germany and in
England, to some of its first stages. That was back in 1914 when I was
for awhile with the British, then for a period with the Belgian forces
afield, then for a much longer period with the German armies and finally
with the British again. I was of like mind then with all my professional
brethren serving publications in non-belligerent countries, excepting
one or two or three of a more discerning vision than the rest. Behind
the perfection of the German fighting machine I did not see the hideous
malignant brutality which was there.
In the first half of this present year, as a partisan on the side of my
country and its federated associates, I visited England and for a space
of months travelled about over France, with two incursions into that
small corner of Flanders which at this time remained in the hands of the
Allies.
I have seen the Glory of the Coming. I have watched the American
Expeditionary Force grow from a small thing into a mighty thing--the
mightiest thing, I veritably believe, that since conscious time began,
has been undertaken by a free people entering upon a war on foreign
shores with nothing personally to gain except a principle, with nothing
to maintain except honour, with nothing to keep except their national
self-respect. In this war our only spoils out of the victory will be
the establishment of the rights of other peoples to rule themselves, our
only territorial enlargements will be the graves where our fallen dead
sleep on alien soil, our only tangible reward for all that we are giving
in blood and treasure and effort and self-denial, will be the knowledge
that in a world crisis, when the liberties of the world were imperilled,
we, as a world-power and as perhaps the most conspicuous example in
the world, of a democracy, did our duty by ourselves, by our republican
neighbours overseas and by our children and their children and their
children's children.
No longer ago than last March, it was a small thing we had done, as
viewed in the light of our then visible performances in France and an
even smaller thing as viewed in the light of what our public men, many
of them, and our newspapers, some of them, had promised on our behalf
nearly a year earlier when we came into the war. At the beginning there
was an army to be created; there was a navy to be built up; there was a
continent to be crossed and an ocean to be traversed if we meant to link
up all the States of our Union with all our plans; there was a military
establishment to be started from the grass roots; there were ninety
millions of us to be set from the ways of peace into the ways of war.
But because some of our politicians professed to believe that by virtue
of our resources, our energy and our so-called business efficiency we
could do the impossible in an impossibly brief time, and more especially
because, among the masses of Continental Europe there was a tendency
to look upon us as a race of miracle-workers living in a magic-land and
accomplishing unutterable wonders at will, and finally because these
same masses accepted the words of our self-appointed, self-anointed
prophets as they might accept Gospel-writ, a profound disappointment
over the seeming failure of America to produce her legions on European
soil, followed hard upon the exaltation which had prevailed among our
Allies immediately after we broke with the common enemy of mankind. In
France I know this to have been true; in other countries I have reason
to believe it was true. As month after month passed until nearly a
twelvemonth had gone by and still the armed millions from America did
not materialise, I think it only natural and inevitable that, behind
their hands and under their breaths, the Poilus called our soldiers “Boy
Scouts” and spoke of our effort as “The Second Children's Crusade.” For
thanks be to a few men among us who worked with their mouths rather than
with their hands, the French populace had been led to expect so very
much of us in so short a space of time and yet there now was presented
before their eyes, so very little as the tangible proofs of our voiced
determination to offer all that we had and all that we were, in the
fight for decency and for humanity.
Do you remember when, on or about the beginning of the last week of
March, General Pershing offered to the Allied command the available
mobile strength of the army under him, for service to aid the British,
the French, the Belgians and the Portuguese in stemming the great German
offensive which had been launched on the twenty-first day of that month?
Pershing made the offer in all good faith and in all good faith it was
accepted. But at that moment all he could spare out of the trenches
and send across France from the East to the West to go into the line
in threatened Picardy was one division of considerably less than forty
thousand men; a puny handful as they measure fighting forces these
times; and that division was stayed in part on French rations, equipped
in part with borrowed French ordnance and provided in large part with
French munitions. Without French aid it probably could not have gone
forward at all; without French aid it could not have maintained itself
after it had taken over the Normandy sectors to which Foch assigned it.
It was not the fault of our military leaders abroad, perhaps it was not
the fault of our people at home that, fifty weeks after entering the
war, we were able to render only so small a share of immediate help in
this most critical juncture of the entire war. But it was the fault of
those who had boasted, those who had bragged, those who had preached at
home what they did not practice, that the French people were beginning
to think--and to whisper--that the United States had failed to live
up to its pledges. These people had no way of knowing what we were
accomplishing over here; they must judge by what they might see for
themselves over there.
The great awakening came, though, before the first of June. Over-night,
it almost seemed, our army began to function as an army. The sea became
alive with our transports, the land became alive with our troops.
Instead of two hundred and some odd thousands of men on French soil, we
had half a million, then a million, then a million and a half. No
longer were our forces without tanks of American manufacture, without
machine-guns of American manufacture, without a proper and adequate
equipment of heavy guns of American manufacture. There was even hope
that our aeroplane production, up until then the most ghastly and
pitiable failure of all, might by autumn, begin to measure up, in some
degree at least, to the sanguine press-notices of the year before--1917.
We who in France could see the growth of this thing came to feel that
perhaps all of our dollar-a-year commercial giants were not being
grossly overpaid and we came proudly to realise that our country now was
responding with all its strength to the responsibilities it had assumed.
The Yanks were no longer on the way; they were here--here in number
sufficient to enable us to lend a strong and ever-strengthening hand in
the turning-back of the enemy and in bringing closer the certainty of a
complete triumph over him. It was the Glory of the Coming. Moreover it
should not be forgotten in the reckoning-up of causes and results that
the lodging of the allied command in the hands of one captain--the most
powerful single factor in inspiring victory--was brought about largely
through American insistence upon the election of a single leader and a
unified leadership for all the forces of the confederated nations in the
field of the western theatre of the war.
I sometimes think the most splendid thing I have seen in this war was
not some individual act of heroism, or devotion, or resolution--glorious
though it may have been. I sometimes think the most splendid thing I
have seen was the making-over of nations, literally before my eyes, in
the fiery furnace of this war. I have seen little Belgium wearing the
marks of her transcendent sacrifice and her unutterable suffering, as
the Redeemer of Man wore the nail-marks of His Crucifixion; I have seen
Britain transformed from the fat, contented, slothful, old grandmother
of the nations, sitting by the chimney-piece and feeding herself torpid
on her plenty, into the militant Britain of yore that has put so many
millions of her sons into khaki and so many of the ladies of Germany
into mourning; I have seen France become an incomparably glorious model,
before all the world for all time, of the heights to which a free people
may rise in defence of national pledges, national integrity and national
existence; and I have seen my own country taking her proper place, in
the most desperate emergency that ever confronted civilisation, as a
people united, determined, valiant and steadfast--the spirit of the New
World binding herself with steel grapples to the best that is in the Old
World and inevitably taking the first steps in the long-delayed campaign
of understanding and conciliation and renewed affection with our
kinspeople and our brethren of the British Isles who speak the same
mother-tongue which we speak and with whom we are joint inheritors of
Runnymede and Agincourt.
As I write these lines, victory appears to be very near. Seemingly, it
is coming one year sooner than we, who were in France and Belgium in
the first months of 1918, thought it would come. And speaking for my
fellow-American correspondents as well as for myself, I make so bold as
to say that all of us are devoutly hopeful that our leaders will make it
a complete, not a conditional victory. For surely those who are without
mercy themselves cannot appreciate and do not deserve mercy from others.
To our way of thinking, the vanquished must be made to drink the cup of
defeat to its bitterest lees, not because of any vengeful desire on our
part to inflict unnecessary punishment and humiliation upon him, but
because he who had no other argument than force, can be cured of his
madness only by force. We who have seen what he has wrought by the work
of his hands among his helpless victims in other lands believe this with
all our hearts.
I. S. C.
New York, November, 1918.
CHAPTER I. WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS
BECAUSE she was camouflaged with streaky marks and mottlings into the
likeness of a painted Jezebel of the seas, because she rode high out of
the water, and wallowed as she rode, because during all those days of
our crossing she hugged up close to our ship, splashing through the foam
of our wake as though craving the comfort of our company, we called her
things no self-respecting ship should have to bear. But when that night,
we stood on the afterdeck of our ship, we running away as fast as our
kicking screw would take us, and saw her going down, taking American
soldier boys to death with her in alien waters, we drank toasts standing
up to the poor old _Tuscania_.
I was one of those who were in at the death of the _Tuscania_. Her
sinking was the climax of the most memorable voyage I ever expect to
take. Five days have elapsed since she was torpedoed, and even though
these words are being cabled across from London to the home side of
the ocean, at least three weeks more must elapse before they can see
printer's ink. So to some this will seem an old story; but the memory of
what happened that night off the Irish coast is going to abide with me
while I live. It was one of those big moments in a man's life that stick
in a man's brain as long as he has a brain to think with.
Transatlantic journeys these days aren't what they used to be before
America went into the war. Ours began to be different even before our
ship pulled out from port. It is forbidden me now to tell her name, and
anyhow her name doesn't in the least matter, but she was a big ship with
a famous skipper, and in peacetimes her sailing would have made some
small stir. There would have been crowds of relations and friends at the
pier bidding farewell to departing travellers; and steamer baskets and
steamer boxes would have been coming aboard in streams. Beforehand there
would have been a pleasant and mildly exciting bustle, and as we drew
away from the dock and headed out into midstream and down the river for
our long hike overseas, the pierhead would have been alive with waving
handkerchiefs, and all our decks would have been fringed with voyagers
shouting back farewells to those they had left behind them. Instead
we slipped away almost as if we had done something wrong. There was no
waving of hands and handkerchiefs, no good-byes on the gang-planks, no
rush to get back on land when the shore bell sounded. To reach the dock
we passed through trochas of barbed-wire entanglements, past sentries
standing with fixed bayonets at entryways. When we got inside the pier
our people bade us farewell at a guarded gate. None but travellers whose
passports read straight were allowed beyond that point. So alone and
unescorted each one of us went soberly up the side of the ship, and
then sundry hours later our journey began, as the ship, like a big grey
ghost, slid away from land, as quietly as might be, into the congenial
grey fog which instantly swallowed her up and left her in a little grey
world of sea mist that was all her own. After this fashion, then, we
started.
As for the first legs of the trip they were much like the first legs
of almost any sea trip except that we travelled in a convoy with sundry
other ships, with warcraft to guard us on our way. Our ship was quite
full of soldiers--officers in the first cabin, and the steerage packed
with khakied troopers--ninety per cent of whom had never smelled bilge
water before they embarked upon their great adventure overseas. There
were fewer civilians than one formerly might have found on a ship bound
for Europe. In these times only those civilians who have urgent business
in foreign climes venture to go abroad.
I sat at the purser's table. His table was fairly typical of the ship's
personnel. With me there sat, of course, the purser, likewise two
Canadian officers, two members of a British Commission returning from
America, and an Irish brewer. There were not very many women on our
passenger list. Of these women half a dozen or so were professional
nurses, and two were pretty Canadian girls bound for England to be
married on arrival there to young Canadian officers. There were only
three children on board, and they were travelling with their parents in
the second class.
Except for a touch of seriousness about the daily lifeboat drill, and
except that regimental discipline went forward, with the troops drilling
on the open deck spaces when the weather and the sea permitted, there
was at first nothing about this voyage to distinguish it from any other
midwinter voyage. Strangers got acquainted one with another and swapped
views on politics, religion, symptoms and Germans; flirtations started
and ripened furiously; concerts were organized and took place, proving
to be what concerts at sea usually are. Twice a day the regimental band
played, and once a day, up on the bridge, the second officer took the
sun, squinting into his sextant with the deep absorption with which in
happier times a certain type of tourist was wont to stare through an
enlarging device at a certain type of Parisian photograph. At night,
though, we were in a darkened ship, a gliding black shape upon black
waters, with heavy shades over all the portholes and thick draperies
over all the doors, and only dim lights burning in the passageways and
cross halls, so that every odd corner on deck or within was as dark as
a coal pocket. It took some time to get used to being in the state in
which Moses was when the light went out; but then, we had time to get
used to it, believe me! Ocean travel is slower these days, for obvious
reasons. Personally, I retired from the ship's society during three days
of the first week of the trip. I missed only two meals, missing them,
I may add, shortly after having eaten them; but at the same time I felt
safer in my berth than up on deck--not happier, particularly, but safer.
The man who first said that you can't eat your cake and have it too had
such cases as mine in mind, I am sure of that. I can't and I don't--at
least not when I am taking an ocean voyage. I have been seasick on many
waters, and I have never learned to care for the sensation yet.
When I emerged from semiretirement it was to learn that we had reached
the so-called danger zone. The escort of warcraft for our transport had
been augmented. Under orders the military men wore their life jackets,
and during all their waking hours they went about with cork flaps
hugging them about their necks fore and aft, so that they rather
suggested Chinese malefactors with their heads incased in punishment
casques. By request the civilian passengers were expected to carry their
life preservers with them wherever they went; but some of them forgot
the injunction. I know I did frequently. Also, a good many of them
turned in at night with most of their outer clothing on their bodies;
but I followed the old Southern custom and took most of mine off before
going to bed.
Our captain no longer came to the saloon for his meals. He lived upon
the bridge--ate there and, I think, slept there too--what sleeping he
did. Standing there all muffled in his oilskins he looked even more of
a squatty and unheroic figure than he had in his naval blue presiding at
the head of the table; but by repute we knew him for a man who had gone
through one torpedoing with great credit to himself and through numbers
of narrow escapes, and we valued him accordingly and put our faith in
him. It was faith well placed, as shall presently transpire.
I should not say that there was much fear aboard; at least if there was
it did not manifest itself in the manner or the voice or the behaviour
of a single passenger seen by me; but there was a sort of nagging,
persistent sense of uneasiness betraying itself in various small ways.
For one thing, all of us made more jokes about submarines, mines and
other perils of the deep than was natural. There was something a little
forced, artificial, about this gaiety--the laughs came from the lips,
but not from points farther south.
We knew by hearsay that the _Tuscania_ was a troopship bearing some
of our soldiers over to do their share of the job of again making this
world a fit place for human beings to live in. There was something
pathetic in the fashion after which she so persistently and constantly
strove to stick as closely under our stem as safety and the big waves
would permit. It was as though her skipper placed all reliance in our
skipper, looking to him to lead his ship out of peril should peril
befall. Therefore, we of our little group watched her from our
afterdecks, with her sharp nose forever half or wholly buried in the
creaming white smother we kicked up behind us.
It was a crisp bright February day when we neared the coasts of the
British Empire. At two o'clock in the afternoon we passed, some
hundreds of yards to starboard, a round, dark, bobbing object which some
observers thought was a floating mine. Others thought it might be the
head and shoulders of a human body held upright in a life ring. Whatever
it was, our ship gave it a wide berth, sheering off from the object in a
sharp swing. Almost at the same moment upon our other bow, at a distance
of not more than one hundred yards from the crooked course we were
then pursuing, there appeared out through one of the swells a lifeboat,
oarless, abandoned, empty, except for what looked like a woman's cloak
lying across the thwarts. Rising and falling to the swing of the sea it
drifted down alongside of us so that we could look almost straight down
into it. We did not stop to investigate but kept going, zigzagging as we
went, and that old painted-up copy cat of a _Tuscania_ came zigzagging
behind us. A good many persons decided to tie on their life preservers.
Winter twilight was drawing on when we sighted land--Northern Ireland
it was. The wind was going down with the sun and the sharp crests of
the waves were dulling off, and blunt oily rollers began to splash
with greasy sounds against our plates. Far away somewhere we saw the
revolving light of a lighthouse winking across the face of the waters
like a drunken eye. That little beam coming and going gave me a feeling
of security. I was one of a party of six who went below to the stateroom
of a member of the group for a farewell card game.
Perhaps an hour later, as we sat there each intently engaged upon the
favoured indoor American sport of trying to better two pairs, we heard
against our side of the ship a queer knocking sound rapidly repeated--a
sound that somehow suggested a boy dragging a stick along a picket
fence.
“I suppose that's a torpedo rapping for admission,” said one of us,
looking up from his cards and listening with a cheerful grin on his
face.
I think it was not more than five minutes after that when an American
officer opened the stateroom door and poked his head in.
“Better come along, you fellows,” he said; “but come quietly so as not
to give alarm or frighten any of the women. Something has happened. It's
the _Tuscania_--she's in trouble!”
Up we got and hurried aft down the decks, each one taking with him his
cork jacket and adjusting it over his shoulders as he went. We came to
the edge of the promenade deck aft. There were not many persons there,
as well as we could tell in the thick darkness through which we felt our
way, and not many more came afterward--in all I should say not more than
seventy-five.
All the rest were in ignorance of what had occurred--a good many were at
dinner. Accounts of the disaster which I have read since my arrival in
London said that the torpedo from the U-boat thudded into the vitals of
the _Tuscania_, disarranged her engines, and left her in utter darkness
for a while until her crew could switch on the auxiliary dynamo. I think
this must have been a mistake, for at the moment of our reaching
the deck of our ship the _Tuscania_ was lighted up all over. Her
illumination seemed especially brilliant, but that, I suppose, was
largely because we had become accustomed to seeing our fellow transports
as dark bulks at night. I should say she was not more than a mile from
us, almost due aft and a trifle to the left. But the distance between us
visibly increased each passing moment, for we were running away from
her as fast as our engines could drive us. We could feel our ship throb
under our feet as she picked up speed. It made us feel like cowards.
Near at hand a ship was in distress, a ship laden with a precious
freightage of American soldier boys, and here were we legging it like a
frightened rabbit, weaving in and out on sharp tacks.
We knew, of course, that we were under orders to get safely away if we
could in case one of those sea adders, the submarines, should attack our
convoy. We knew that guardian destroyers would even now be hurrying to
the rescue, and we knew land was not many miles, away; but all the same,
I think I never felt such an object of shame as I felt that first moment
when the realisation dawned on me that we were fleeing from a stricken
vessel instead of hastening back to give what succour we could.
As I stood there in the darkness, with silent, indistinct shapes all
about me, it came upon me with almost the shock of a physical blow
that the rows of lights I saw yonder through the murk were all slanting
slightly downward toward what would be the bow of the disabled steamer.
These oblique lines of light told the story. The _Tuscania_ had been
struck forward and was settling by the head.
Suddenly a little subdued “Ah! Ah!” burst like a chorus from us all A
red rocket--a rocket as red as blood--sprang up high into the air above
those rows of lights. It hung aloft for a moment, then burst into a
score of red balls, which fell, dimming out as they descended. After a
bit two more rockets followed in rapid succession. I always thought a
rocket to be a beautiful thing. Probably this belief is a heritage from
that time in my boyhood when first I saw Fourth-of-July fireworks. But
never again will a red rocket fired at night be to me anything except a
reminder of the most pitiable, the most heart-racking thing I have ever
seen--that poor appeal for help from the sinking _Tuscania_ flaming
against that foreign sky.
There was silence among us as we watched. None of us, I take it, had
words within him to express what he felt; so we said nothing at all,
but just stared out across the Waters until our eyeballs ached in their
sockets. So quiet were we that I jumped when right at my elbow a low,
steady voice spoke. Turning my head I could make out that the speaker
was one of the younger American officers.
“If what I heard before we sailed is true,” he said, “my brother is in
the outfit on that boat yonder. Well, if they get him it will only add a
little more interest to the debt I already owe those damned Germans.”
That was all he said, and to it I made no answer, for there was no
answer to be made.
Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty, then twenty-five. Now instead of
many small lights we could make out only a few faint pin pricks of light
against the blackness to mark the spot where the foundering vessel must
be. Presently we could distinguish but one speck of light. Alongside
this one special gleam a red glow suddenly appeared--not a rocket this
time, but a flare, undoubtedly. Together the two lights--the steady
white one and the spreading red one--descended and together were
extinguished. Without being told we knew, all of us--landsmen and seamen
alike--what we had seen. We had seen the last of that poor ship, stung
to death by a Hunnish sea-asp.
Still silent, we went below. Those of us who had not yet dined went and
dined. Very solemnly, like men performing a rite, we ordered wine and
we drank to the _Tuscania_ and her British crew and her living cargo of
American soldiers.
Next morning, after a night during which perilous things happened about
us that may not be described here and now, we came out of our perils and
into safety at an English port, and there it was that we heard what made
us ask God to bless that valorous, vigilant little pot-bellied skipper
of ours, may he live forever! We were told that the torpedo which
pierced the _Tuscania_ was meant for us, that the U-boat rising unseen
in the twilight fired it at us, and that our captain up on the bridge
saw it coming when it was yet some way off, and swinging the ship hard
over to one side, dodged the flittering devil-thing by a margin that can
be measured literally in inches. The call was a close one. The torpedo,
it was said, actually grazed the plates of our vessel--it was that
we heard as we sat at cards--and passing aft struck the bow of the
_Tuscania_ as she swung along not two hundred yards behind us. We heard,
too, that twice within the next hour torpedoes were fired at us, and
again a fourth one early in the hours of the morning. Each time chance
or poor aim or sharp seamanship or a combination of all three saved us.
We were lucky. For of the twelve ships in our transport two, including
the _Tuscania_, were destroyed and two others, making four in all, were
damaged by torpedoes before morning.
Next day, in London, I read that not a man aboard the _Tuscania_,
whether sailor or soldier, showed weakness or fright. I read how those
Yankee boys, many of them at sea for the first time in their lives,
stood in ranks waiting for rescue or for death while the ship listed and
yawed and settled under them; how the British sang “God Save the King,”
and the Americans sang to the same good Allied air, “My Country, 'Tis
of Thee;” and how at last, descending over the side, some of them to be
drowned but more of them to be saved, those American lads of ours sang
what before then had been a meaningless, trivial jingle, but which is
destined forevermore, I think, to mean a great deal to Americans. Perry
said: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” Lawrence said: “Don't
give up the ship!” Farragut said: “Damn the torpedoes, go ahead.” Dewey
said: “You may fire, Gridley, when you are ready.” Our history is full
of splendid sea slogans, but I think there can never be a more splendid
one that we Americans will cherish than the first line, which is also
the title of the song now suddenly freighted with a meaning and a
message to American hearts, which our boys sang that black February
night in the Irish Sea when two hundred of them, first fruits of our
national sacrifice in this war, went over the sides of the _Tuscania_ to
death: “Where do we go from here, boys; where do we go from here?”